To Mars and Back (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798907227002)

India - the country that sent a spacecraft to Mars for less than the budget of a Hollywood film about Mars - decides to send actual humans there. And bring them back.

Commander Arjun Krishnamurthy leads a crew of five: a brilliant astrobiologist who left Caltech to be first, an engineer who grows chilli peppers on a dead planet, a flight surgeon who notices everything and says nothing until she's sure, and a Swedish geologist who eats curd rice with his hands, teaches Sanskrit, and knows things he shouldn't.

Across twenty months of radiation storms, dust storms, a fuel crisis, and coffee that never improves, the crew discovers evidence of ancient life on Mars - the most significant scientific finding in human history.

But the mission's greatest discovery isn't in the rocks. It's in the crew. One of them carries a secret older than civilisation - one that will answer the question Arjun's father asked on a terrace in Kerala thirty-two years ago: whether we are alone.

Grounded in real science, told with the warm wit of a country that breaks coconuts before rocket launches, To Mars and Back is about the absurdity of leaving home, the genius of doing the impossible on an insufficient budget, and the discovery that the universe is far less lonely than it pretends to be.